There has been introduced an energy saving technique for reducing consumed power in a base station in the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) as a standard project of the mobile communication systems (see Non-Patent Document 1, for example). For example, consumed power in the base station can be reduced by stopping the operation of a cell managed by the base station, that is, by stopping the use of the radio resources, during nighttime with less communication traffics.
In the meantime, in order to optimize the load balance between base stations, the base station may make the user terminal of its own station perform the handover to a neighbor base station. In this case, the base station can determine whether or not to cause the user terminal of its own station to perform the handover, based on resource information indicating the usage status of the radio resources received from the neighboring base station.